The present disclosure relates generally to providing information relating to items in a network environment, and in particular to providing users with the ability to submit feedback on any appropriate criterion related to an item.
As an ever increasing amount of information about a wide variety items become available electronically, such as from a retailer or provider over the Internet, it becomes increasingly difficult to compare and research the various items. For example, a user or customer looking to purchase a suitable toy for a toddler and that might be appropriate. Oftentimes, a site will have one or more pictures of a toy, as well as specifications and details provided by the manufacturer or retailer of the toy. Such information is typically very objective, including information such as the dimensions and weight of the toy, but does not really give the customer a good feel for whether the toy is appropriate for a toddler, as well as whether the toy is durable or educational, for example.
In order to obtain more information about the toy, the user might use a search engine to attempt to locate reviews or other information about the toy(s) on other sites. This is a time-consuming process for the customer, and is undesirable to the retailer selling the toy because the customer is leaving the retailer site in order to obtain additional information, and might end up purchasing the toy elsewhere as a result. Further, there are thousands upon thousands of toys available, and often there is not a lot of information available for any given toy.
Various retailer sites have attempted to solve such problems by providing various forms of feedback and opinion-related options to its users. In some cases, a retailer might hire reviewers to provide reviews for certain items. This approach is costly to the retailer, and only provides a limited amount of additional information as it is limited to one person's perspective on each selected item. Many sites alternatively (or in addition) allow users to submit reviews for various items. These user reviews can provide a wealth of information, but the reviews can be unwieldy to parse through and it can be tough for a user to get a quick and useful overview of items based on the volume of information that may be available for a given category of items. Further, it takes a substantial amount of time and effort for a user to submit a review, such that users might be unwilling to submit a review for an item unless the users are extremely unhappy with the item, for example.
Some sites have attempted to make it easier for users to submit feedback for an item, and thus get a better overview of user opinions of the item, by allowing users to rate an item on a numerical scale or a star rating system, for example. Such information is only somewhat useful, however, because the rating system does not provide any context for the rating. For example, it is impossible to know whether a toy receives a rating of 5 on a 10 scale because it is not durable, because it does not work as expected, because it is not fun, or any other such reason. Further, some sites use the rating system only to suggest items to a user, and do not factor these ratings into an overall rating for the item, instead basing the overall rating only on aggregating ratings provided with the full reviews.
The limited amount of feedback information available can be particularly problematic for certain items, such as laptop computers. A user might want to find out any of a wide variety of important information for a laptop such as whether the laptop is durable, whether it is good for gaming, how the battery life compares to other laptops, if there are an unusually high number of crashes or error messages, or other such information that typically would not be found in the objective item information and might, at best, be buried in one of a number of long user reviews.
Some Web sites have added limited context with the numerical-style rating system in order to attempt to provide more useful feedback. For example, a site might ask users to rate how educational a toy is on a scale of 1 to 5. Such an approach requires the site to generate and maintain questions and answers for each item, as well as to attempt to determine which questions and answers would be useful. Such an approach also typically results in a limited number of questions, as the site does not want the overhead of creating a volume of questions for an item. Further, such an approach only gives objective numerical-type ratings, and does not provide any substantive context for the ratings.